Harmonic Shared Storage Solution Delivers Exceptional Performance for Price
“After putting the MediaGrid shared storage system through its paces and comparing its performance against competing solutions, we found that the Harmonic system won in every category and metric,” said Alan Young, chief technology officer at Encompass. “In addition to being a cost-effective, high-performance solution, the MediaGrid system has the advantage of being backed by Harmonic’s exceptional service and support team. All of these factors make it easy for us to establish efficient workflows that adeptly address the changing demands of our clients and the media marketplace.”
Boasting nearly a petabyte of usable storage and 9200MB/s of IP bandwidth, the new MediaGrid ContentStore 5840-based system installed at Encompass facilitates storage and editing of content up to 4K/UHD. Supporting a majority of the industry’s playout servers, the system seamlessly accepts content from ingest, stores it in a central repository that is available to nonlinear edit systems, and delivers finished content to the appropriate server for playout.
In addition to enabling work with higher-resolution content, the MediaGrid system delivers exceptional performance by using dramatically less rack-space and power resulting in a lower cost per terabyte. With system connectivity established via 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Encompass also realizes the flexibility and cost benefits that come with IP-based media and data transport. In providing design, installation and training services, Harmonic helped Encompass ensure that its network infrastructure is optimized to support very high-capacity, media-focused workflows.
Unlike many competitors, Harmonic provides its storage solutions with unlimited file system driver licenses. Because the company’s file system driver works well with all major operating systems, editors and media management solutions, users such as Encompass have the freedom to integrate any number and variety of third-party systems with the central storage system. The renowned Harmonic file system driver ensures that the MediaGrid storage system yields the same performance at 99 percent capacity as it does at 1 percent. As Encompass continues to expand its business, the Harmonic system will facilitate smooth scaling of bandwidth and capacity without interruption to ongoing operations.
“Encompass provides essential services to many of the world’s best-known media companies, and these services require a reliable central storage solution that enables the movement of massive files with relative ease,” said Doug Triblehorn, regional vice president for North America Broadcast at Harmonic. “The MediaGrid ContentStore 5840 delivers this performance along with compelling cost benefits that set it apart from all other large-scale shared storage solutions.”
Further information about Harmonic and the company’s products is available at www.harmonicinc.com.
About Encompass Digital Media
Encompass Digital Media, a global leader in mission-critical media capture, management and distribution services, owns and operates facilities in Atlanta, Buenos Aires, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York Metro and Singapore. Encompass serves the world’s leading local, regional and global media companies, broadcasters, corporations and government end-users with customized, cost-effective and innovative solutions. The company’s premier services include channel playout, centralcasting for broadcast TV stations, transmission (satellite, fiber and IP), digital services (content aggregation, VOD, CVOD (C3), 24x7 streaming, event streaming, linear transport and stream origination), government solutions and video production services/studios. For more information, please visit www.encompass.tv.
About Harmonic
The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are also subject to other risks and uncertainties, such as those more fully described in Harmonic’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended Dec.31, 2014, its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and its Current Reports on Form 8-K. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to Harmonic as of the date hereof, and Harmonic disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements.